Our liberty, or their elevated positions and ego?

Krakatoa blogs at Ace of Spades,

Aside from rote lip-service, the Left, and the quislings on the Right, are not interested in your health, your lives, or your liberty. Their only truly animating interest is in their own elevated positions and ego.

Nothing strokes one's ego more than forcing someone else to do something they don't wish to do, except maybe forcing someone to do something they don't want to do and then get endless flattering press for it.

As always in our country and throughout the history of civilizations, the ratchet driven by activists grinds almost unfailingly in the direction of empowering the State to dominate its people.

Curtailing first non-enumerated rights such as the ability to simply speak plainly via the creation of cultural stigma for holding opinions or manners of speech that only yesterday were commonplace and common-sense; and then turning that stigma into mob retaliation vis-a-vis getting people fired from their jobs, or outright violence in the streets aimed at people attending political rallies.

Once certain thoughts and often seemingly insignificant liberties have been essentially criminalized, they move on to attacking those concrete rights that were once presumed unassailable, but have entered the realm of "polite debate" by a compliant populace too interested in maintaining some level of nonconfrontational comfort to strenuously object to every inch requested by the so-called "moderates". Inches that in the rear-view mirror turn out to be miles and miles of forgotten or forsaken liberties.

Make no mistake: The never-ending litany for "compromise" requested on gun control does not come close to masking the goal of gun prohibition. They want you disarmed, and cultural inertia has made them less and less reticent to proclaim it.

Assuredly, every step away from our Founder's intentions is framed by its proponents in terms of saving lives, or ensuring some liberty for some defined cohort. Their duplicitous nature is revealed when those exact arguments are dismissed when offered in service of a liberty or cohort the Left isn't championing, such as the rights of the unborn, the health concerns of a populace whose borders are overrun with the non-vaccinated and/or no small number of violent criminals, the freedom of a landowner to manage one's property, et cetera.

And so it goes: Yet another mass murder that could have been prevented simply by maintaining the the laws on the books and the remedies at hand, all ignored or torn down like Chesterton's theoretical fence without truly comprehending the consequences. Or worse, with full comprehension of the consequences, but utilizing a brutal calculus that values the creation more voters for the next election more highly than the long term health and security of one's nation & citizens.

Never trust any legislation proposed in response to the acts of the madman or the thuggish practitioner of a 7th century violent religion.

I would go further: If in response to a situation like this our government should pass legislation that rolls back such an essential liberty of otherwise law-abiding citizens as the right to keep and bear arms, those reasonable people have the inherent right to refuse to comply and to resist as peaceably as possible. And if it becomes impossible to resist peacefully, any blood spilled will be on the hands of those who decided by any rationale to trade said liberty for peace in the first place.

A people whose only powers, liberties & remedies are those strictly defined by the State is not a free people at all.